Chapter 466: Greater Good, My Ass!
The Third Timeline queued up.
A vision of Ji’an as a demonic cultivator, betrayed by her own sect, burned at the stake while Wangchen tried to freeze the flames.
She kept walking.
The Fourth Timeline...
Ji’an as a wandering physician, poisoned by a rival alchemist, dying in Wangchen’s arms in a desert.
She kept walking.
Timeline Five. Timeline Six. Timeline Seven...
A horrifying carousel of betrayal, murder, political maneuvering, and tragedy.
Every single time, she was used.
Every single time, she died. And every single time, Xie Wangchen arrived just late enough to catch her body, his soul fracturing further and further into madness.
"I SEE YOU, UNIVERSE!" Ji’an screamed at the scrolling visions, tears of rage and grief streaming down her face, but her boots never stopping, never slowing down. "I SEE THE PATTERN! YOU THINK YOU CAN BREAK ME WITH TRAGEDY BACKSTORIES?!"
She raised her heavy cast-iron spatula high above her head like a standard-bearer marching into war.
"I AM LIN JI’AN! I HAVE SURVIVED BRUNCH SHIFTS ON MOTHER’S DAY WITH A BROKEN GRILL AND TWO HANGOVER LINE COOKS! YOUR COSMIC TORTURE IS NOTHING COMPARED TO THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY!"
The darkness shrieked, throwing everything it had at her.
The gravity tripled.
The voices became a deafening cacophony of screams.
But she didn’t look back or hesitate.
She marched through the graveyard of her own past lives, a silver-haired, spatula-wielding anomaly fueled by the spite of a woman who refused to let a trashy plot dictate her menu.
She was going to walk through all seventeen timelines and reach the end of this corridor. And when she finally found the server room of the Heavens, she was going to speak to the manager.
And Heaven help whoever was sitting at the desk.
The Corridor of the Eclipse was a relentless, grueling marathon of generational trauma, and Lin Ji’an was treating it like a Friday night dinner service where the entire front-of-house staff had quit.
She marched through the suffocating darkness, her heavy boots pounding against the invisible floor.
The peripheral visions of her past lives, Timelines Three through Eight, had blurred into a chaotic, rapid-fire montage of high-fantasy garbage.
She had seen herself poisoned by jealous martial sisters, thrown off a cliff by a demonic cult, and executed by a paranoid emperor.
She had watched Xie Wangchen arrive too late, die trying to save her, or completely lose his mind and freeze the surrounding geography in a fit of despair.
"Is this it?!" Ji’an yelled into the void, swinging her cast-iron spatula through the darkness, shattering a phantom manifestation of a venomous snake that tried to bite her ankle. "Is this the best the World Will can do?! A rotating cast of emotionally stunted male leads and unseasoned plot twists?! I’ve seen better narrative structure on the back of a cereal box!"
The darkness howled, increasing the gravitational pressure until it felt like she was walking through chest-deep wet cement.
"Surrender," the voices whispered, echoing the dying breaths of a hundred different betrayers. "The cycle is infinite. You are the anomaly. You are the mistake."
"I am the Head Chef, you melodramatic hallway!" Ji’an roared back, her lungs burning, her Body Fusion core pushing her forward by stubborn spite. "And the only mistake here is this universe’s total lack of quality control!"
But even as she yelled, the toll was becoming physical.
Her soul was vibrating, trembling under the weight of so many accumulated deaths. The human mind was not designed to process its own murder in high-definition surround sound.
The scrolling ribbons of light on the edges of her vision suddenly hitched.
The rapid-fire montage stopped.
The darkness deepened, pooling around her ankles like cold water, and the peripheral projection stabilized into a new, terrifyingly crisp scene.
The Ninth Timeline.
Ji’an’s transmigrator instincts immediately flared.
The lighting in this vision wasn’t the warm, romantic hue of the Second Timeline, nor the cold, snowy tragedy of the First.
It was stark, sterile, and aggressively bright.
The vision illuminated the grand, sweeping marble courtyards of the Divine Zenith Pavilion, a sect known for its purity.
Standing in the center of the courtyard was the Ninth Timeline’s version of the original Ji’an.
She was dressed in plain, unadorned white robes, looking exhausted, battered, and miserable.
Standing opposite her, elevated on a dais of pure white jade, was a man.
He was the quintessential, textbook definition of the "Righteous Master" trope.
He wore flowing robes of white and silver.
He possessed an impossibly handsome face, framed by silver hair pinned perfectly with a jade crown. He radiated an aura of supreme, untouchable superiority.
This was Qin Changxu.
A crucial protagonist.
The revered, saintly master who had originally taken Xie Wangchen under his wing before the Ice Demon’s reputation forced him into isolation.
Transmigrator Ji’an, walking the dark corridor, let out a loud, aggressive scoff.
"Oh, look," Ji’an sneered, pointing her spatula at the vision. "It’s the ’Righteous Hypocrite’ archetype. Let me guess: he speaks in philosophical riddles, claims everything he does is for the ’Greater Good of the Realm,’ and is secretly the most toxic, manipulative sociopath in the entire cast."
The vision proved her right with brutal speed.
In this timeline, the original Ji’an had sought refuge with Qin Changxu, believing in his reputation for absolute justice.
But the Righteous Master didn’t see a girl seeking asylum; he saw a useful asset, the unique Yin energy of the Lin bloodline.
"You have consorted with the demonic, Lin Ji’an," the phantom Qin Changxu declared, his voice echoing with cold, sanctimonious judgment across the marble courtyard. "Your connection to the Ice Demon, Xie Wangchen, has tainted your core. The Orthodox Alliance demands purification. For the safety of the Azure Empire, your cultivation must be dismantled."
The original Ji’an fell to her knees, weeping, pleading her innocence. "Master Qin, please! I have done nothing wrong! Wangchen only protected me! Do not cripple my core!"
Qin Changxu didn’t flinch.
He looked down at her with an expression of pity.
"It is for the greater good," Qin Changxu murmured, raising a hand glowing with blinding, righteous white light. "A necessary sacrifice to maintain the balance of the Dao."
He struck her.
It wasn’t a clean, lethal blow.
It was a surgical dismantling of her spiritual foundation. The blinding light slammed into the original Ji’an’s chest, shattering her meridians, crushing her golden core into dust.
The original Ji’an screamed, a sound of such soul-shattering agony that Transmigrator Ji’an actually stumbled in the dark corridor, clapping a hand over her own chest as a phantom pain ripped through her sternum.
"Return her to the Lin Estate," Qin Changxu ordered his disciples, wiping his hands on a silk cloth as if he had just taken out the trash. "Let her live out her mortal days in repentance."
"I am going to braise his liver," Transmigrator Ji’an gasped, forcing herself to stand upright in the dark, her silver-flecked eyes burning with pure fury. "I am going to find Qin Changxu in the current timeline, and I am going to run him through a meat grinder. ’Greater good,’ my ass! You just wanted her out of the way!"
But the vision did not linger on the Righteous Master.
The scroll shifted, carrying the narrative forward to the grounds of the Lin General’s Estate in the capital.
The original Ji’an had been returned to her family.
But she was no longer the bright, innocent jewel of the estate. She was broken, with her shattered meridians leaking spiritual energy constantly, causing her chronic pain.
She lay in a dimly lit bedchamber, pale, hollow, and rapidly fading. Her soul, which had endured nine consecutive timelines of betrayal, murder, and torture, had finally reached its structural limit.
Her soul was cracking. Faint, jagged lines of gray static marred the original Ji’an’s spiritual aura in the vision.
She was dying, and this time, there wouldn’t be enough spiritual cohesion left for a return trip.
Sitting by her bedside, holding her fragile, freezing hand, was a young man in dark military armor.
It was none other than Lin Feng.
Her older brother.
Transmigrator Ji’an’s breath hitched.
She watched the peripheral vision with desperate intensity.
’Lin Feng. My brother. The boy who gave up everything for the doomed.’
In the vision, Lin Feng’s face was twisted in an expression of helplessness. He looked at his dying sister, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.